Review of Lightyear

The good:

• The first 34 minutes. Action-packed, filled with snappy and coherent sci-fi archetypes setting the science and world-building in a short amount of time. The Interstellar, Star Wars and time-traveling sci-fi concept are set with a more than engaging premise. But then the "far timetravel" happens and we are provided with a cliched, run-of-the-mill, underdog adventure where every single plot device and sci-fi reference serve little to no purpose.

The Bad:

• The humor. Doesn't work at all. It's quippy but not smart, it is on the nose and egregiously stops the flow of scenes simply to elongate the punchline halting the pacing of some scenes and sometimes even ruining emotional moments. And the pen joke is too much, it's just too much. Making Taika Watiti's character unbearable and not as charming as Thor's Korg.

• After the first half hour, the IQ of the movie drops by a lot. They start speaking on-the-nose cliched phrases, inconsistent action direction with characters popping wherever the plot needs them to be, a serious lack of stakes or consequences for any of the inexperienced characters and lastly some of the most child-like abrupt changes of mind. The plot has stakes and the story has an engaging, high-stakes premise but once Buzz goes to the future and we meet the rookies, no context is given to the current state of the planet. This info is saved till later for shock-value so we aren't as invested in the action that ensues because we don't know who is who. And for the rest of the movie, Buzz's attempts to fix things are interrupted by the rookie's incompetence. It simply becomes too much, to a point of these mistakes being hard to redeem given every relevant plot advance is halted by a supposedly emotional moment where they feel miserable for being so incompetent. This is not how you do an underdog uplifting character arc, we need the rookies to be scolded, shaken into acting and composing themselves, give them some tough love to try their best. Not only to cry and acknowledge their feelings all the time. Also, they need real personal consequence not just plot-relevant ones: e.g. When Buzz is captured and the hyper speed crystal is stolen because of Izzy's incompetence, these are plot-related consequences not personal to her. There should have been real ones, like she had one of her friends killed or severely injured, or she herself received a wound or damage of some sort. These rookie characters just act like dumb kids, always getting involved even though they know they aren't prepared for it... And all they do is get sad when things don't go their way, why not get angry? Is either that or they just appear where the plot needs them to be. And lastly, proof of how there's a lack of consequence is the ending for Buzz when he returns to the human colony: he is made the captain of the space rangers and applauded despite having caused all the problems in the first place and that he should be arrested.(which again we don't know what he did because we know nothing of what future old Buzz has done to the colony...). We have spent no time getting to know the rookies or their relationship with Buzz, so any attempted emotional pay-off in the end is just unearned.

-The Ending is so dumb. The fact that the reason Zurg is called Zurg is because the robots can't say "buzz" (which is the simplest syllable to pronounce) is stupid. This trend of explaining the most small and irrelevant things is bafflingly tiring to me (like Han Solo's last name). But more egregiously to me is the double damage that Zurg's reveal "plot twist" causes. By retconning Zurg's identity, the movie actively executed the most tired cliche in sci-fi (the "i am you but from the future and am secretly not secretly evil" trope) and kills any sense of consistency from the previously established Zurg characterisation in the Toy Story media.

Anyways, the movie decides to leave ALL the reveals to a flashback expository scene. Granted, the reveal that circles back to Buzz's original mistake that marooned everyone in that uninhabitable planet is a satisfying idea; but it feels predictable in its message. Also, the history of evil Buzz is so stupid, his plan is motivated because when he came back he wasn't received with applause? No wonder they don't trust him, he failed so many times people had lost hope. So, it's too drastic a decision to leave and hold that grudge for the next 50 years.

• The tempo of the movie. It isn't a bad thing per se, just a very distracting one. I know kids have a short attention span and this movie is action-packed but the movie does not halt for a second and this harms some of the more realistic aspects of the sci-fi physics scenes. Like, when Buzz is trying to help with the rookie's damaged spaceship reentry in the atmosphere, he flies around in space in the middle of reentry at high speeds without reheating, only the ship; then when the ship lands it does so with more speed than Buzz's landing yet he manages to land, remove the heavy jetpack and run to the landing of the ship just in time for the doors to immediately open and everyone gets off in like 5 seconds unaffected by the rough landing. It's not something super wrong, is just distracting because the movie is rushing and you don't feel the weight of the physical toll these sort of maneouvers take. Like, wearing that chunky armor must limit mobility and must affect how fast you can walk and run yet they move like if it was a second skin. Also, after a hard landing, I feel like I'm missing a scene where the characters breath in and sigh after successfully accomplishing a hard task. There's no such moment in this movie, noone gets tired nor gets harmed nor suffer bumps in their heads even though they never wear their helmets and they fall from seilings and get blasted by bombs. I'm not saying people should die or get injured but if the movie is choosing to represent a more gritty and realistic sci-fi movie, it feels off that everything is so "okay" all the time.

• The Art style just doesn't fit the context. I'm not talking about the realistic CGI rendering, I'm talking more foundational. This movie is supposed to be the "live action" movie that inspired the Buzz Lightyear toy line in 1995 and it was released in the "live action Toy Story universe", that is, is the one that inspired Andy to buy the toy. So here comes the stylistic discrepancy: the movie's style has a very clear modern visual take on sci-fi in the likes of Halo and ironically Wreck-it Ralph's Hero's Duty fictional arcade game but it is more reminiscent of the gritty and chunky-armored warriors of games like DOOM, Gears of War and Warhammer 40K. Some of these trends were set before the year the movie is supposed to have fictionally been released. So stylistically it makes sense, and I am not saying these are bad by any means. Gritty sci-fi settings are one of my favorites. But the design of Buzz Lightyear's toy is inspired by a mix of 60s/70s Space-age Sci-fi in the line of more commando-articulated action figures like ActionMan and GI Joe.

When you are portraying toys, it's very easy to "time" them in the era they were released. If you did a movie that was supposed to be the inspiration for a line of toys, if the inspiration is too far design-wise from the style of the toy, it won't "look" like the toy is from that movie, it just looks like, well, the movie was done years later inspired in that toy but with a modern mentality. Which is the real life scenario in this case. I think this is a perfect example of a failure to capture nostalgia. And this notion is hammered home even further by the fact that PIXAR already released two pieces of world-building media around Buzz Lightyear in the fictitious video game featured in Toy Story 2 and the 2D animated TV Show during the 2000s. Both of which I love as they follow the aesthetic set by the design of the original Buzz.

• The tone. It's not a bad aspect per se, it's just a preference. And it's biased by my love for the original animated TV show. But I think they went about the tone and characterisation in this story all wrong. Granted, there're some decisions copied from the show like the classic trope of the "underdog rookie team" proving that they can be legendary space rangers, the classic sci-fi tropes that always work no matter the style (like an AI robot that helps our heroes) and the design, action pieces and space-ships that work because these styles are so synonymous with sci-fi that they become timeless. But yet, I would have made this movie more "cartoony", that is, more light-hearted and over the top and more self-aware. Because this movie is attempting to do something that is very very hard: try to present this movie as something from which an already established IP came from. The icons and the symbolism linked to Buzz have already been ingrained in our subconscious and the younger generation doesn't know the trendy toy simplification pre-Y2K. Like with the 1990s Ninja Turtles movie, if you look at the tone and feel of the movie and then look at its toy line you see that the commercials, design of the turtles and other related media is a "colorful simplification or more striking adaptation" of the movie in toy form. So all in all, I know what they are going for with Lightyear, they want this movie to be the equivalent to the Ninja Turtles live-action movie to an already "cartoonish" version of humans in the Toy Story universe. And this toy-ception is too much to ask from the audience and creative director Pete Docter admitted this too.

All in all, I don't think this movie deserves the hatred people have been giving it. I don't even think it deserved to flop either. I think its ambition and generic diverting style harmed its reception, sadly making it a tad too forgetable. And in the context of the new Animation revolution with media like Puss in Boots 2, Arcane and Into the Spider-verse breaking records, the times are changing.